Retired-Again
by Nadie2
Summary: Jack wakes up partially paralyzed and with no memory. Luckily his friends and Sam are there to help him. He just wishes he could remember how he and Sam got together.
1. Good Enough Memory

"_No man has a good enough memory_

_To be a successful liar." _

-Abraham Lincoln

That crisp smell of antiseptic hospital room. The gentle beeping of an IV. The coarse feeling of infirmary blankets against flesh exposed by the hospital gown.

These things are familiar.

A hand in his.

Less familiar.

Consciousness slips.

-0-

Pain. Unendurable sharp pain.

Make it stop.

His thumb twitches… thumb twitches are supposed to stop pain, but it isn't working.

"Jack?" an excited voice asks.

"Augh," he manages through chapped lips. His voice has the sound of one that hasn't been used in a long time.

"Good to have you back in the land of the living," the voice says.

"Oww," Jack says.

"Ah, God, your morphine," the voice says, putting a button in his hand.

His thumb twitches.

Blessed relief.

Consciousness slips.

-0-

"…but to make a wormhole traversable, you need not only the energy of the naquada and the memory capabilities of the crystal, but you also need exotic memory with a negative density. I haven't been able to figure out what does that in our Stargate…" a voice states.

"Stop."

"I knew the technobabble would wake you up," the voice says with giggle.

He tries to open his eyes.

"How are you feeling, sir?" the voice asks, having lost his giggle.

"Where?" he says, hating how weak his voice is.

"You're in the infirmary. You've been out for a couple of days. You had us pretty worried. Well, not Janet, she told us how long you'd be out for from the very beginning."

"What happened?" he asks. He has no idea what happened to him. Then, with sudden panic, he realizes that he has no idea about anything. He doesn't even know who the hell he is. He frantically tries to move.

"Take it easy, sir," her voice says soothingly to him, "Janet!" a more frantic voice says to someone far away.

"Sir, sir, you need to calm down," another female voice says.

A needle touches his arm. He feels some cold liquid going into it.

Damn tranquilizer.

Consciousness slips.

-0-

This time, he opens his eyes before he does anything else. He knows he's going to have to have slow movements if he's going to avoid getting tranquilized again. A tank of a black man with a strange shape on his forehead is sitting in a chair in the corner of the room.

"O'Neill," the tank greets him.

"You're here in case I need to be restrained," he tells the man. He doesn't want to make friends with his bodyguard quite yet.

There is pain, so he twitches his thumb to liberate some sweet morphine.

"I do not believe that will become necessary, old friend," the tank says.

"What makes you so sure?" the man asks, lifting one of his arms to massage his growing headache. There are a lot of wires coming out of his arm.

"All warriors experience flashbacks of events which nearly cause their death. It is nothing of which to be ashamed," the tank says.

It wasn't a flashback. You need memories in order to have a flashback. The man in the hospital bed has no idea what happened to him, or who he is. Except that he must be called O'Neill, and the one holding his hand isn't here anymore.

"I don't remember…" Jack says.

"You do not remember the battle in which you were injured?" the tank clarifies.

"Yeah, that… or anything else," the man in the hospital bed says.

The tank stands and presses a small alert button. Then he looks at the man in the hospital bed. "Your name is O'Neill, you are a warrior of great renown. My name is Teal'c of Chulak, and we have done battle together on many occasions."

"What seems to be the matter?" a short brunette comes into the room. Her voice is not the one of the hand-holder. She does not technobabble.

"O'Neill has revealed that he has no memory."

"Well, it's not uncommon to be confused about recent events when you're badly injured, especially with the drugs that he is on."

"I don't remember anything," Jack says.

"Anything?" she asks with her forehead wrinkling in concern.

"Well, I remember that pushing the button in my hand makes the pain go away. I have a vague recognition that I know you people," he gestures around the room, "I trust you. Beyond that…" he shakes his head.

The short women stares at him for a little bit. "I'm going to order an MRI of his brain this time. Meanwhile, I think your team and I should have a chat with the general."

"My team?" he asks.

"I am a member of your team," the tank says, walking out of the room.

Nurses come along, and wheel him to a small machine.

O'Neill reviews what he knows about the world. He is in an infirmary. He was injured in battle. He has a team. The tank is named Teal'c. He is safe. That's all he knows about the world. But for now, it's enough.

-0-

O'Neill is being rolled down the hallway back to his room. He catches a loud argument coming from his room.

"Sam, I can't let you do this!"

"It's my choice, Daniel."

"I agree that Major Carter should be allowed to do this if she chooses," the tank… Teal'c says.

"How come you didn't do it before?" the voice that must be Daniel says.

Then he rolls into the room, and whatever answer was about to come out of the young blonde's mouth dies on her lips. "Sir, are you ok?"

"Peachy," he says.

"It was touch and go for a while. I thought I was going to lose you," the blond women says softly.

He notices her eyes are puffy. She's been crying. He's pretty sure she never cries. Even when the world is going to end.

Wait, that's hyperbole right? He hasn't actually faced the end of the Earth with these people, has he?

"I'm fine," he says.

"Fine is a bit of an overstatement. He has retrograde amnesia caused by a traumatic brain injury. The good news is that most or maybe all of his memories are going to come back. It's going to take time, maybe years. There are probably some things that are gone forever," the short brown-haired women in a lab coat says.

"But he can make new memories? He's going to remember this conversation, right?" Daniel asks.

"I think so," Janet says.

"I know his name is Teal'c, and that you're Janet," Jack says helpfully.

The blond gives him a weak smile.

"I don't think we should be overwhelming the Colonel with any facts about his life right now, but if you wanted to keep him company," Janet says as she starts to leave the room.

"Doc… I'm fine, apart from the head?" he asks.

She looks at his body for a second, before meeting his eyes and nodding.

She's lying. He knows her well enough to know she's lying. There is something wrong with him, and the others were just warned not to say anything about it.

"Sam, Teal'c and I have some things to attend to, if you've got this?" Daniel says.

The blonde nods.

Sam. That's her name. Samantha when she's in a skirt. Sammy when she's crying. Sam when she's among friends.

That's right, isn't it? Why does he feel like there are a couple of words and descriptions are missing from the list? What did he call her when she saved the world? What was his name for her when he wanted her to laugh? What word did he use when she was bashful? She was bashful sometimes, but what made her that way?

"Sam, I don't need to be babysat, if you've got something to do," he says.

She freezes, and blinks at him. "What did you just call me?"

"That man… Daniel, didn't he just say your name is Sam?"

"Right, it is… It's just, you don't call me Sam."

"I'm sorry, what do I call you?" he asks.

"You know what? Sam is fine, it's… better. Besides, I'm really not supposed to be pointing out the things you can't remember."

He nods his head, but the puzzle does not leave his mind. He can't imagine he calls her honey, darling, sweetie, babe, or any such nonsense. He's pretty sure she'd punch him if he tried.

So what term of endearment does he use for her?

"This war… the one that went bad. Everyone else ok?" he asks.

"It was a rescue mission. A medic got pretty banged up. It's kind of a miracle we made it out of their without any fatalities. It was a trap. But we don't leave men behind. You taught me that."

He remembers her as she was when they first met. She was so young and green, and it was so important to her that he knew that she was able to take care of herself.

He can see her in a knife fight with a big scary man who smelled like rotten meat. She's risking her life to let a teenage girl marry the man she loves.

"I don't think you needed me to teach you anything," he says.

"But you taught me so much," she says sadly. Past tense.

"Sam, can you just tell me what the hell is wrong with me?"

"Janet said it might be overwhelming for you," she says looking away.

"It sure as hell can't be as bad as I'm imagining it to be," he says.

She's crying again.

"Sammy," he pleads.

She stands up, and walks over to him, "We don't actually know for sure…" She lays her hand on his thigh.

It's a weird time for her to be frisky, but she thought he was dead.

She squeezes it, "You feel that?"

"Of course," he says.

She moves down and touches his calf. He can see her touching it, but he can't feel anything. "What's going on?" he asks in panic, trying to sit up.

"Don't move," she says with moist eyes.

"I'm paralyzed?" he shouts.

Janet comes running in, "Sam, why did you tell him? I told you he needed to wait." Sam backs against the wall, looking embarrassed by her actions.

"I'm paralyzed, and she's the only one with the guts to tell me?" he rages, but the whole time he knows enough not to move his back. He's no fool.

"Sir, you're not paralyzed. There is an incomplete break at your L4 vertebrae."

"And what the hell does that mean?" he asks.

"It means that you might walk again."

"Might?" he shouts.

Janet looks him in the eye, "I'm sorry, sir. We are looking into an experimental procedure which may solve the problem. I didn't want to tell you until we knew. Even without it there is a chance that when the swelling goes down, and with some therapy you'll retain full function. Worst case scenario, you can't move anything below your knee."

"Great," O'Neill says quickly.

"I'm almost certain you've retained bladder, bowel, and sexual function," Janet adds.

"Almost?" he says with the sarcasm that only comes out when his world is falling apart.

"I'm sorry, Colonel," Janet says. She was reaching out her hand to tap him on the leg, she thinks better of it at the last second, and taps the bed instead.

Janet walks out the door, and O'Neill figures that Sam will follow after. She stands, and walks over to his bed instead.

"Sir?" she asks softly.

"I'd like to be left alone," he says.

"No, sir," she says.

A flash of her saying those words come into his mind. They are somewhere else, unbearably hot, though it's night. He had asked her if it said 'Colonel' anywhere on his uniform, even though he knew that it did not.

"You need to leave."

"I'm not going anywhere," she says taking his hand in hers.

"You don't want a broken-down soldier," he says.

She blinks at him confused. He wonders briefly if they've been having two different conversations at one time.

"I would never leave you… Jack," she says with sudden softness and joy in her eyes that are completely foreign to him. He finally knows his first name, but it sounds strange coming from her lips. It sounds like a lie.

"Samantha," he says, using her skirt name, "I can't remember when we first got together."

Then he does. This kiss in the gate room. Homer's shocked face. Him dipping her low.

"Never mind," he says.

She blinks in surprise, "What?"

"I am remembering little bits all the time. As soon as I asked the question, I remembered the kiss in the gate room."

"The what in the where?" Sam asks.

"I'm sorry, we're not a secret, are we? I mean, Homer was there."

"Who?" Sam asks. Then she pauses, and looks at him. She takes a deep breath, "Look, it won't be long before you find out that your job is crazy. Unbelievable kind of crazy. You wouldn't understand it if I told you now, but Hammond doesn't remember that moment. No-one knows about us. As far as they're concerned, you're just my boss, and I'm just on your team."

"Why?" he whispers. This is hurting more than the loss of his legs or his memory. He doesn't want to lose the holder of hands.

"It was against regulations. We would have had to be on different teams."

"Now I'm a cripple, and it doesn't matter," he says bitterly.

She turns to him with the first smile he's seen since waking up. It brings back flashes of hundreds of smiles. Most of them coming after one of his bad jokes. "Now we get to stop pretending. Well, not totally. I think we should pretend it started right here, right now."

Her eyes move back, and forth searching his.

He smiles. "Sam, maybe we should just go our separate ways. You're young, and beautiful, and smart. I'm none of those things. You didn't sign on for this."

"I didn't like you for your ability to walk. I'm not going to stop liking you for the lack of that ability," she says.

"What about my ability to operate my bladder?" he asks. It isn't quite the problem he wants to discuss with her, but it's closer than the walking one. It at least involves the same organ.

"I'm here to stay, no matter what does and does not work," she says, cutting to the heart of the issue.

She pulls a chair from the corner of the room over to his bed. She sits down, and grabs his hand.

This is right. The world is right when she's got her hand in his.


	2. The Past Can Hurt

"_Oh yes, the past can hurt._

_But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it."_

-Rifiki

_The shot rings out on the second story of his house. It is crisp and clean, with no reverberation. It had sunk into something._

_ He feels horror, but he doesn't remember why._

_ He runs up the stairs two at a time. It's his son's room._

_ He has a son. Charlie is nine and loves space and baseball and fishing and bubble gum. He loves his son. The feeling overwhelms him in the dream._

_ Then he sees his son dead. He feels things, like grief, and despair, and terror - only stronger._

He wakes up with a start. He tries to calm his breathing down.

The memories are coming back to him like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Right now, he's got five pieces of a 500-piece puzzle, and he has no idea what shape it's forming. This new blood-soaked piece leaves more questions than he can even contemplate. What happened to Charlie? Why does he feel like it was all his fault? Where was Charlie's mother now?

He knew that Charlie wasn't Sam's son. He felt it, but it was confirmed with logic. After all, he's pretty sure the Air Force would have figured out that Sam and he were together if they'd had a kid together.

He was in the Air Force. No-one had told him that, had they? There had been reference to "teams" and "missions", but no-one had given him the branch of the military before.

The pieces were coming together faster and faster, and Jack was more than a little afraid he wasn't going to like the picture they formed when they were all together.

-0-

_He sees Daniel and himself by the fireplace at his house. He doesn't know how he knows that it is his house, but he does. Daniel is giddy and flushed with alcohol, even though he hasn't had much. Daniel doesn't drink much, and when he does, it is only to keep himself from being swallowed completely by guilt._

_ "So when am I going to meet this wife of yours?" Daniel asks with a silly grin on his face. He wants to see his friend happy. He wants to believe that happiness still exists._

_ And Jack has to disappoint him. "Ah… that would be never."_

Jack opens his eyes in the stillness. She is gone, but what kind of gone? 'Dead' gone, like Charlie? Or 'left him' gone? He knows that he certainly didn't leave her. He doesn't love her anymore, but there, in the memory, after she was gone, he still did.

The sharpness of the pain, like it was first happening, comes over him. So soon after the memory of his son's death, Jack decides that he is not going to sleep again tonight. Maybe his memories have nothing to offer him except for grief following on the back of grief. Maybe he's better off if he never remembers.

"I lost my memory once," a voice from the corner of the room says.

Jack jumps. He wasn't expecting anyone to be there.

It was Daniel's voice, Jack realizes, although he can't make out the shape of the man in the darkness.

"I remember that the memories came back the most at night. It always seems like the worse ones were the first ones. I thought I'd stay with you for part of tonight. In case you needed some reassurance that your whole life wasn't horrific."

"Are you sure it wasn't?" Jack asks.

Daniel laughs. It's a weak laugh. A sad laugh. A laugh of someone who has been through a lot of pain himself. "You've had a shitload of crap happen to you Jack. A lot of it was horrible. Some of it was amazing."

"Charlie," Jack says. He lets the word hang in the air like a bomb. Like after that word all of his friend's cheerful platitudes would have to die in his mouth.

"Well, at least you've got the worst memory out of the way. That's another reason I stayed. When I came back from being ascended, the memories that came back to me were almost as real as they were when it first happened. I worried that if you came across a memory like that… Well, I was the one who talked you out of killing yourself after it first happened. I figured that I might be the best one to do it the second time around."

The memory of the two men standing before a giant arch, next to a bomb, comes into Jack's mind. _"I don't want to die. And your men don't want to die, and these people certainly don't want to die. It's a shame you're in such a hurry to."_

He closes his eyes, "Thanks for that save."

"You remember it?" Daniel asks.

Jack nods his head.

"We aren't supposed to tell you a whole lot of things. You're supposed to remember on your own. They did the same thing when I came back from ascension. I hated it. There are some questions I won't answer, but there are a great deal I will if you want to ask them."

Jack smiles in gratitude, and thinks for a long moment if there are things that he wants to ask. "What happened to Charlie's mom?"

"Sara? You and she got divorced, about seven years ago."

He remembers the silence. He knew that if he just spoke… said anything… they might have been able to fix it. It would have been hard, though. It would have been an uphill battle. He hadn't had the strength for battle just yet. So he'd stayed silent, and he'd felt his wife drift away from him.

"I'm sorry, Jack," Daniel says softly.

Jack sighs, and starts to roll over on his side. He feels some sort of restraint in the bed to keep him from moving in a way that would damage his back.

"Is there any way I could get her to leave?" Jack asks.

"Sara? I told you, she's gone," Daniel says, confused.

"Sam. She's too young to be taking care of a cripple."

Daniel leans back in his chair, and considers his friend carefully. "You know, Jack, I don't think so. I think you could be absolutely horrible to her, and she would stick by you. I know for a fact that I couldn't get her to leave you."

Jack looks at his friend in surprise. Did he wake up in the middle of some sort of love triangle?

Daniel laughs, "Don't worry. I'm not competition. Sam and I are friends. Good friends. The kind of friends that are closer than family. All of SG-1 is that to me. I tried to get her to leave you for the same reason that you are. I don't want her to have to take care of you. I tried to convince her… I said we could get a nurse. I said that Teal'c and I could help out. Make no mistake, Teal'c and I are going to help out no matter what she decides. She wants to do this Jack. There is not talking her out of it.",

There is silence between them for a long time. Not the uncomfortable silence which had strangled Jack's marriage. It's the calm silence that comes between two people when they have said everything that needs to be said, for now. The sort of silence which anticipates years more of talking and laughter.

"Jack, you can go to sleep," Daniel says softly.

"I don't want to dream," Jack says with more honesty than he meant to. He knows that he is going to have to sleep eventually, but he finds himself preferring to wait until after dawn, if there is such a thing as dawn this far underground. The dreams that come in the early morning are always a great deal more pleasant than those which come late at night. Darkness is friends with despair, and sorrow, and fear, and Jack doesn't want any more of that.

Daniel flips on the light, and pushes his glasses up his face. "Let's see if we can find a hockey game on."

"A hockey game at one in the morning?" Jack asks with a glance at the TV.

"Alright. You like the Simpson's right? We'll find that," Daniel says.

"Daniel, you don't watch much TV, do you?" Jack asks.

"The history channel," Daniel defends.

"You argue with them, don't you?" Jack asks, narrowing his eyes at the younger man.

"Only when they're wrong," Daniel says cheerfully, turning the TV on and flipping through the late night offerings.

-0-

Teal'c finishes his Kel-no-reem around three in the morning. Jack had fallen asleep, despite his best attempts to fight it. When Teal'c enters the room, Daniel flicks off the television and tip-toes off to get some sleep himself.

Since Jack got hurt, they've been keeping watch, just like they do off world. Well, not just like they do off world, of course, because there is a hole in the watch schedule which is usually filled by Jack himself, and off-world you don't have to keep watch in the day time as well as the night. They modified the schedule, though, and spelled each other around the clock to ensure their teammate would never wake up and be alone.

For a while, the memories that come to him in dreams are pleasant ones. He remembers Christmas morning at the cabin in Minnesota when his son was small. He remembers the stories his grandfather used to tell of a "simpler time" before the "metal monsters", as the old man had called machines. He remembered playing on an abandoned and rusting threshing machine when he was but a child. He remembered the first time he kissed Sara. She'd been so young then, so easy to impress. He can remember the first time that he handled the controls on a plane. That feeling it gave him, like he'd just began to live. He'd felt like the rest of life was just a dress rehearsal, and this, this was what he'd been waiting for.

Then… Well, then, he gets the memory of his first death. The sickening metallic smell of blood, so different than what he'd expected that his brain doesn't actually comprehend what is right before it. The vacant look in the eyes of the airman, who isn't quite dead, but isn't alive enough to give a moving last speech, or say anything at all.

Jack jumps at bit as he returns from the memory.

"Do you require assistance?" a voice from the corner of the room asks. It takes a minute for Jack to recognize the voice. A moment longer to assign it the name Teal'c, and one more to realize that that voice belongs to the true reality, and that the blood came from a different one.

"No, I'm fine," he says. He's ashamed that his voice is anything but reassuring.

Teal'c walks across the room, and sits down on the chair by his bed that Sam moved their yesterday. Teal'c doesn't say anything for a long time. Then his voice says, "I have many memories which I would not like to re-live, should I be given the opportunity."

"I hear you," Jack says, wishing that this topic of conversation would be closed. It isn't very manly.

"It is part of being a warrior."

Jack says nothing. He's trying to keep all his sarcastic comments inside, because he knows that his friend does not deserve them. But they all amount to something like, "War sucks; no shit, Sherlock."

"Sometimes, when I am deep in kel-no-reem, thoughts of the atrocities that I witnessed and committed while in the service of Apophis come to mind."

Jack understood little of that sentence, but he doesn't feel like having his friend define the hard words for him like he's the slowest kid in class.

"During those times I remind myself to be grateful that was forced to endure these things instead of another."

Jack closes his eyes slowly, and nods his head. It isn't much comfort, but it is something, and perhaps it is all that can reasonably be offered.

Just then, a short man wearing sand-colored clothes, including a strange piece of leather over his shoulder, walks into the room.

"Jacob Carter, I am pleased that you could answer our summons," Teal'c says.

"Of course, I heard that someone is hurt. It's not Sammy, is it?" Jacob asks, before looking around the room. When he does his eyes fall on Jack on the bed, Jack's mind is putting together puzzle pieces, and discovering that Jacob saying Sammy, and sharing her last name must make him her father.

"O'Neill has been injured in battle," Teal'c says.

"How bad?" the short man, says coming to his bedside.

"Ah, hi, nice to meet you," Jack says.

Jacob takes a step back, "Nice to meet you?"

"Well, I guess you didn't know that my memory was kaput, but a greeting before you started playing doctor wouldn't have hurt things. Speaking of 'doctor', does mine know you're here?"

"George gave Dr. Fraiser a call on my way down here, and it's nice to see you, Jack." There is warmth and a sparkle in the man's eyes which eases Jack's fears a bit. He is feeling all the things he felt when his first girlfriend brought him home to meet her parents. He knows that is ridiculous, partly because he isn't 16 anymore, and partly because Jacob doesn't know that Jack and Sam are dating. At least, he doesn't know yet.

"So your memory is affected? The healing device doesn't do so well with brains, but I can give it a try," Jacob says.

"The whosiwhat-now?" Jack asks incredulously.

"It is his spinal cord which you were summoned here to mend," Teal'c says.

Jacob's face crumbles uncomfortably, "I'm sorry, Jack," he says.

Janet enters the room quietly, "I'm glad you could make it, sir. I think if anything can be done, you're the one that can do it."

"I'm going to try my best, but the healing device isn't that great with nerves. It's great with bone and flesh and blood, but not nerves," Jacob says, his voice falling a bit at the last word.

"At the very least you can get the swelling down, and save him weeks of healing and waiting before he starts the rehab," Janet says.

"Can you help me roll him over?" Jacob asks.

Jack stifles his groan when they roll him over. He doesn't want them to go easy on him, because they hear the noise. He wants them to get on with the fixing. His pain is irrelevant.

He doesn't hear any noise, or feel any pain. Apparently the silence is this device working. Before long, they roll him back over.

"Can you move your foot?" Jacob asks.

Jack tries until beads of sweat appear on his face, but nothing happens.

"Bending at the knee would be easier," Janet says helpfully.

Slowly Jack's foot slides up the bed as he bends at the knee. It takes him almost a minute to make an inch of process.

"That's excellent, sir," Janet says.

"Excellent?" he asks with an eyebrow raise.

"With therapy…" she begins.

"'Excellent' would be me jumping up and doing a jig. What just happened was not 'excellent'."

"Well, he's definitely Jack even without the memories," Jacob says.

"Can you reduce the tissue damage in his brain?" Janet asks Jacob, completely ignoring her ranting patient. She was actually quite used to ignoring this particular ranting patient.

"I don't think it would help much with the memories, but I'll do what I can," Jacob says.

"I'm not sure I want the memories coming back faster," Jack says, alarmed. He can't imagine having a night like last night only with more memories.

Jacob puts his hand on Jack's shoulder for a long moment before he helps Dr. Fraiser turn him over. Jacob touches Jack temples gently. Jack isn't sure if this is a motion of affection or if it has a medical purpose. Either way, Jack is surprisingly ok with it.

Jacob is wearing a strange bracelet. He lets it hover over Jack's forehead, and it starts to glow.

A flash of a memory. Someone, some child that he loved, was holding something in Daniel's face. Killing him.

Daniel's wife was holding it before his face as well. Killing him. Until Teal'c killed her.

He can't pull back from the light, so he screams for all he is worth.

"Jack! Jack? What's wrong?" Jacob asks, putting the device behind his head.

"Sha're… Sha're used one of those things on Daniel. She was trying to kill him."

He's confused by this. He sees their kiss. He sees her smiling at him. She loved him. Why would she do that?

"Jack, it was something else that did that. They look almost the same, but they're not," Jacob says.

"I'm sorry," Jack says, embarrassed by his own freakout.

"It's ok. We're all warriors here," Jacob says. "Ok if I try to fix some of the damage in there?" Jacob says carefully.

Jack nods.

Jacob lifts it up, and Jack looks past it like you do in a dentist chair. He remembers every dentist chair that he has ever been in. He remembers, too, a time when a bad little alien took him up onto a ship.

Actually, alien abduction and going to the dentist wasn't very different. Except the abduction hurt less.

Jack doesn't flinch. He just looks past into Jacob's eyes. It's going to be over soon. He just has to wait it out. If his whole life is going to be pain, he's going to have to stop panicking every time some new aspect of his own pain is revealed to him.

The light stops. "How do you feel?" Jacob asks softly.

"The headache is gone," Jack says, letting a little more awe get into his voice at the words than he really meant to. He hadn't noticed how painful his headache was until it was suddenly removed from him.

Janet smiles, "It's going to get easier from here on in."

He isn't so sure about that. He's not quite convinced that he wants to remember who he was. He lived a life where there was nothing particularly surprising about an alien abduction. A life where you got shot on missions. A life where your girlfriend's father was a freaking alien, fer crying out loud. Wait, if Jacob was an alien, did that mean…

He scrunches up his forehead, "Is Sam an alien?"

"Sam?" Jacob blinks in surprise.

"Your daughter," Jack clarifies, confused by the man's confusion.

"I know who Sam is, it's just you've never called her that before," Jacob says with a glint of suspicion in the corner of his eyes.

Crap. Jack remembers that he's supposed to be pretending that he and Sam aren't together, or are just barely together. Probably even more so with her father. He remembers that calling her Sam would be a dead giveaway that they were together, but he still can't remember what he is supposed to call her instead.

"I'm sorry, I'm dealing with limited memories here. I just heard Daniel call her that, and figured…" he lets his voice drift off at the end.

"Right, sorry, Jack. I suppose it would be hard to pick up on something like that when you're basically working with a blank slate. She's under your command, so you don't call her by a first name. You call her Carter."

_His own voice in panic rings through his head, "Carter dial the gate!" _

_Then pride, "Carter, good command."_

_The time she bit his hand when she was blinded and in prison, "Carter, if anyone comes in here you bite their hand!" "Yes, Sir," with a giggle._

Panic, Pride, and trust, those were things that he should have felt for her, but there was something else, going through it.

He called her Carter. Called her it when he fought beside her, called her Carter when she saved the world (and he had figured out by now it wasn't hyperbole). But in his head she was always Sam.

He loved her. He smiled at the knowledge, and wondered if he'd ever told her. How new where they? He and Sam?

Just then a commanding bald man enters the room, and Jack greets him warmly, "Homer!"


	3. Ordinary Man

"_An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in existence."_

-Dr. Who

The commanding bald military officer enters the room, and Jack greets him with "Homer."

The man frowns at him. Janet hides a chuckle. Jacob doesn't bother to hide it at all.

"Jack," the man who is apparently not Homer warns.

"General, there is his loss of memory to consider," Janet says, swallowing her chuckle to play peacekeeper.

"I'm General Hammond, General _George_ Hammond," the new man says. "I came to see the success of this little experiment."

Jacob shakes his head, "It helped, but he's not going to be running from Jaffa anytime soon."

"How long is he going to need?" George asks. He very to-the-point. Jack remembers that he likes that about the man. He also remembers that George does not find his jokes humorous. Well, at least not usually.

"I'm afraid, sir, that I've given up hope of Jack ever making a full recovery. I have no doubt that he'll make improvements, but he'll never be fit for active duty again," Janet says sadly.

"Are you sure? We've seen people come back from pretty tough odds before," Hammond asks.

"I'm afraid that I don't think that is going to work. Not this time, sir," Janet says, hanging her head.

"George, we could offer a Tok'ra symbiote," Jacob says.

A memory flashes before his brain. He doesn't know what a Tok'ra symbiote is, but he knows it has to do with Sam, Sam in prison, screaming his name and begging for release.

And not screaming his name and begging for release in a good way.

"No," he says firmly.

"Jack, I know you're not a big fan of the snakes, but I think this is going to be about the only way you're going to continue the fight against the Goa'uld," Jacob says, coming closer to his bedside.

"It's either that or a medical discharge," George says with concern in his eyes.

Jack remembers meeting this man, this man that was not Homer. He'd been retired then. He'd liked it. He remembered is cabin in Minnesota. He remembered asking Sam to come with him.

She always said no.

Maybe there were fish in Colorado.

"I'll take the medical discharge," Jack says.

The room around him looks surprised. Apparently they had underestimated his love of fishing, and hatred of those damned Tok'ra snakes.

Besides, there was Sam to think about. He loved her. If he let them put a snake in his head, he was going to have to go to somewhere far away, and fight the Goa'uld. He was going to have to pretend, around her father none the less, that he wasn't in love with her.

If he stayed, he was going to get to claim her in public, and wrap his arms around her every night.

It was selfish, he knew, but he didn't really care.

"Ok, I'll draw up the paperwork, Jack; you know the Air Force will take care of whatever medial and therapy needs you have," George says, touching the younger man's shoulder before he leaves the room.

Sam walks into the room, ready for her shift by his bedside, and is surprised to see her father there. "Dad," she says, giving him a warm hug, and causing Jack to remember the first time he meet Jacob in Washington, _"Get out of town, Sam's dad? I've heard nothing about you," he'd quipped. _

She'd been nervous then, but not as nervous as she was now.

"Have you tried the healing device?" she asks him.

"I tried, Sammy, I'm afraid it didn't have the effect we'd hoped for," Jacob says softly.

"No, but I can bend my knee at a snail's pace, so there is that," Jack quips. Sarcasm, his favorite defense mechanism, he thinks with self-hatred as he hears the words come out of his mouth.

Sam's face is full of empathy, truer than sympathy. She sit in the chair by his bedside, but moves it away an inch. He can tell that she wants to hold his hand, that she needs the comfort as badly as he does. But she just can't bring herself to do it.

"George is filling out the paperwork for a medical discharge form the Air Force," he says, holding out his hand to her.

Sam doesn't take it. She just stands up, and flings herself over Jack's chest, and started sobbing. Jack rubs her back, and calls her "Sammy", because she's crying. That's her name when she's crying. He's certain of it.

Janet slips out of the room, but not far enough so she can't hear the fallout; she's discrete, but she's not an idiot. Turns out she needn't have worried about it. She could have crossed a whole lot of distance before she would have missed out on Jacob Carter's booming, "What the hell?"

Sam pulls back, wiping the tears off her face with the rough sleeve of her BDUs. Jack can't help but flinch. Those things feel like they're made out of tent fabric, fer crying out loud; couldn't someone have handed her a Kleenex? They're in an infirmary, there has to be a Kleenex around here somewhere.

Sam stands up to her full height, and looks her dad in the face. She's taller than him. Towering over him, almost. But it takes a lot more than a couple of inches to intimidate a General.*

"What is going on?" Jacob asks.

"I'm comforting Jack," Sam says without a flinch. He knew that Sam was brave. He'd seen her defuse bombs, and take on armies of Jaffa, and look System Lords in the face (he remembers in a series of flashes). He'd even seen her blow up a sun.

He realizes right there, in that moment, that he had never seen Samantha Carter quite as brave as she was right then.

"And when exactly did the two of you become 'Jack' and 'Sam' to one another? The last time I was on Earth, you were still 'Carter' and 'Sir."

"Maybe, then, you've been gone for a bit too long," she sneers back.

Jack can't believe what he's hearing. He was pretty sure Sam was trying to keep the fact that they'd been together before his accident a secret.

Jacob's face goes soft. Not from the reproach, but from some realization that escapes Jack, "Sam?" he asks.

Her face is immovable, like an iron mask, and Jack has no idea what it's hiding. She nods, one brief nod.

Jacob looks over at Jack, "Maybe I have been gone too long. Sammy, are you sure?"

"Yes, I am finally sure," Sam says with confidence Jack's never seen in her before. It's not the play acting confidence that really displayed how insecure she was. Not like the confidence with which she'd talked about her reproductive organs when they first met. No, this confidence was real, and deep. It occurs to Jack that Sam has done a lot of growing up in the years that he'd known her.

When they met, she was way too young for him. He was a dirty old man for just noticing that she was gorgeous.

Now, though, they could meet as equals. He was young for his age. She was old for hers.

"Ok, then," Jacob says, giving his daughter a hug. It's the bone-wrenching kind of hug that he used to give her when she was a little girl. He lifts her off the ground at the end of it, and she squeals a little.

"For the record, I have no idea what's going on," Jack says. Teal'c has slipped out of the room now, so he's alone with the Carters.

"What's going on, Jack, is my daughter chose you. Goodness knows why," Jacob begins. Sam tries to interrupt him to supply the why, but he silences her with a wave of his hand, "She'd better never regret the choice."

"No, sir," Jack says with seriousness. It's a little ridiculous, he realizes, to make that promise. After all, he has no idea what sort of a man he actually is. For all he knows she might go about blithely breaking her heart.

"That's good, because Selmak is thousands of years old, and she knows plenty of ways to torture you," Jacob says.

"Is Selmak Sam's mother?" Jack asks.

Both of the Carters find this hilarious. When Sam finally manages to stop laughing she says, "Well, maybe we could consider her my step-mother."

Jacob makes a horrible face, "Never say that again, young lady. Do you know what it's like to have a symbiote throw-up while inside of you? A host-symbiote relationship is deep. Deeper than romance. But it is very… family-like in nature. We are certainly not married to one another."

"Symbiote?" Jack asks.

Sam looks at Jack in sympathy, "This has got to be the strangest place to wake-up with no memory. Dad havehas a Tok'ra symbiote in him. A small leach-like creature that is attached to his brain. They share a body. It's the reason why he could heal you. Without it, Dad would have died a couple of years back."

"So that's the part of him that's alien?" Jack asks.

Sam nods.

"That's a relief. I wasn't sure whether or not you were an alien," Jack says.

"Hey, there is nothing wrong with dating an alien," Jacob defends, a bit too quickly.

"Dad, are you seeing someone?" Sam says in surprise.

Jacob doesn't say anything, but he looks just guilty enough to count as a confession.

"Really? What is she like?" Sam asks, turning all of her attention toward her father.

As Jacob beings a rather lengthy description of a Tok'ra he's fallen for, Jack falls asleep. Here, in the room with two Carters, he feels safer than he has since he'd first woken up without any idea who he was.

-0-

A nurse shuffles past him and changes the IV bag. He must have slept for a long time, because Daniel is back in the room. He wishes there was a clock in the room so he could judge how much time had passed since he was last awake. He'd even settle for a window so he could tell if it was day or night.

"How are you feeling?" Daniel asks.

"Better," Jack says.

"Well, that's pretty amazing, considering the fact that you've been off pain meds for hours," Daniel says cheerfully.

"The wonders of aliens with bright lights," Jack quips, readjusting in his bed.

Daniel's eyes lose their cheerfulness at these words. "I'm sorry that whole healing business didn't go better. I know that you were hoping to get back out there."

"I know that all of you were hoping I could. I'm not so sure what I was hoping for," Jack says thoughtfully.

"You're kidding, right? Going to other planets? Saving the world? Kicking some Goa'uld ass? You love that stuff."

"I don't know, maybe I'll be more angry about it when I remember more," Jack says with a shrug.

Daniel nods his head. "When I came back from being ascended, I almost quit, too. I mean, it just seemed so reckless, what we do. But…" Jack waits in expectation. There must be something he's missing. Some secret that explains why he does this crazy stuff, "I just fit. And there is always one more mystery. Sometimes I think I'll quit. I thought, 'once I find Sha'uri, I'll be done'. But then I had to find her kid. Then, it was 'after I beat Apophis and get revenge'. Well, when that was done there was other System Lords. And then there was the lost city to find, and…"

"There is always something," Jack says sadly. He'd been waiting for a long time to retire. Waiting, because retirement would mean something good.

"So Janet says you get to go to a rehab facility soon. You're probably going to have to live there for a couple of weeks depending on your progress, but then you're going to go home. Sam and Jacob are modifying your house to be wheelchair-friendly right now. Luckily, all the doorways were big enough, except for that weird little curtain thing between your living room and your kitchen, but you don't use that anyway…" Daniel is speaking quickly, but stops when he (finally) notices that his friend is not quite ready to deal with any of the more practical results of his disability right now.

"Daniel, I have to know… what happened?" Jack asks gesturing to his legs.

Daniel takes a deep breath, "It was a rescue mission. Both you and the General knew it was probably an ambush before we went into it, but you didn't care. You were determined to get Wells out of there alive. And you did," he says with a fake smile.

Jack looks away.

Daniels voice goes softer, "That counts for a lot; you know the guy's wife is going to have a baby any day now."

Jack remembers that Daniel is an orphan.

"You were hit by a staff weapon blast. It should have killed you. We were wearing these new staff-weapon-proof vests, so it didn't. It just knocked you backward. Your head hit some rocks, and this stick went right into your back. Sam had the thing all wrapped with gaze by the time we carried you out of there. Probably saved you from having more damage. They ended up removing it in surgery," Daniel shakes his head. "I just wish… I had stuck by you."

"What-ifs won't get you anywhere. If some of those what-ifs were true, something worse could have happened instead," Jack says softly.

"I just feel responsible," Daniel says, looking down at his hands.

He always does, Jack knows suddenly. It doesn't matter how many lives Daniel saves, he always spends all of his time dwelling on the lives that he isn't able to save. Daniel is such a good man, and he has no idea.

"Daniel, this isn't your fault, and I'm not even that upset about it. I think… I'm ready for the next stage in my life."

"With Sam?" Daniel asks.

Jack nods.

Daniel obviously want to say something more. There is a moral debate going on in him. It spurs a little debate inside of Jack. He should ask his friend what is wrong.

But he's terrified of the answer.

The mutual dilemma is broken by Sam opening the door to his room with an ice cream cone in each hand. "See, Dad, I told you he's awake, and he's ready to share some ice cream."

"Couldn't you sneak me some beer instead?" he asks.

The comment comforts everyone. It makes them feel that he is still the same Jack O'Neill he was yesterday. But the comment itself is a little dishonest. He's already begun to discover it is one of the things he says to keep people from discovering the man behind the curtain. You give them a few flashy details - puts beer on everything, likes peridot, loves to fish - and that's all they'll ever see. They'll never look beyond them for something more.

Which is safe, if not completely brave.

***Apparently the actor who plays Jacob is taller than the actor who plays Sam. It just really doesn't look like this from on screen. To the point I can't quite make myself believe it. I did my research after I had not only written this little paragraph, but fallen in love with it. So it's not accurate. I am writing a story about a Stargate after all.**


	4. No Place

"_There is no place like home."_

-Wizard of Oz

Jack starts the fake cheer right after dinner. Either the head trauma made him a much better actor, or his team was pretty tired out from keeping him company 24 hours a day for days on end. Either way, they leave him alone for the first night.

Every time a nurse came to check on him throughout the night, he seems to lose a wire or a monitor. By morning, he was free of any attachments to the wall.

Even his most embarrassing connection, the one that Janet was 'almost certain' was temporary came out, much to his relief. This resulted in him going to the bathroom every half-hour, and he wasn't quite ready to dispense with the adult diapers, but it did show promise for the future.

Without Jacob's help it, might have taken several more weeks before he reached this level of independence.

Janet's shift started at eight in the morning. She comes in to his room first thing. "Well, let's get you up and off to rehab."

"By rehab, do you mean fishing?" Jack asks.

She smiles, "Come on, it's not so bad. You're going to get to see the sun."

"Oh, sun," he mocks.

"Now, let's get you in a chair," she says as a nurse rolls one into the room.

All the levity evaporates from the room in a second. He glares at it.

"Hopefully it's just temporary," Janet says softly.

"Right," he says, knowing that there is nothing poor Janet can do about it.

It took two nurses to lower him into the chair. One of them did it with her hand on his butt. Apparently she figured that when you're crippled, you have no personal boundary issues anymore.

Sam arrives just then, and takes the handles of his wheelchair. "I've got it," he says, putting his hands on the large wheels of the manual wheelchair.

"Actually, sir, you're going to be pretty tired if you push yourself, even with all your upper body strength. You're going to need to save that energy for the physical therapy when you get to rehab," Janet says.

"Great," he says, folding his hands on his lap.

Sam is worried about the lack of sarcasm coming from him right now. She gives his shoulder a squeeze.

At the surface, he gets into a handicap-accessible van. "I suppose I'll have to get one of these. I loved my truck."

"This is rented for a month. We'll see where we are after that," Sam says.

"Right," Jack says, feeling like he's going to be in the exact same place. Literally the same place, this exact chair. Well, probably a different one, since this had 'Property of the United States Air Force' stamped on the back.

Maybe he'd even have to go wheelchair shopping. That sounded fun.

Sam, Daniel, and Teal'c try to talk to him the whole van ride. Well, not Teal'c, but still. About half way there, Sam says "Stop," in such an authoritative voice the poor Airman can't help but obey.

Here it is. Apparently it only took one surly van ride to break her. That's a whole lot less than he thought it would take.

They're not just pulling over, though, they are turning. Sam opens the door, and waits for the little automated ramp to come down. Daniel rolls him, out apparently having guessed whatever Sam is planning, even though Jack has absolutely no idea.

They're at a park. There is a bridge. He's rolled onto it. It's a little scary, the uneven ground.

"Look, I don't have a fishing rod, but you're going to pretend," she says.

He glares at her.

She mimes casting, and reeling up to cast again.

"Your form's off," he says lazily.

"Ok, show me," she says, handing over the imaginary rod.

"Sam," he says warningly.

"Your life is not over, Jack. You've still got your friends, and your fishing, and your telescope, although we're probably going to have to move it off the roof, and you've got me. And if that's not enough for you, well, then, I'm sorry!" she yells the last words with no small amount of panic.

She's been having a day, but it has nothing to do with his disability. It has to do with him being an ass. He can't make the accident go away, but he can treat her better.

"C'mere," he says, pulling her onto his lap. The bridge has an incline to it, and Sam hadn't set the break when she'd stopped Jack on it. So with the added weight, the chair starts to slide backward down the bridge, causing both of them to scream in a very unsoldierly way.

Teal'c steps forward to catch them without comment.

"I think I have an imaginary fishing pull up my butt," Sam whispers to Jack.

"At least it's not an imaginary sidearm," he whispers back, having remembered Antarctica sometime during the night.

She giggles "Am I hurting you?" she asks with concern.

He shakes his head. Teal'c starts to push them over the bridge. Jack kisses her. He'll never be able to dip kiss her again, like the first one, but this is nice. Really nice.

He thought that when he kissed her, the memory of a lot of other kisses would come back, but he still only has that one. He wants to ask her how long they've been together, but he decides to wait for some time when Daniel and Teal'c aren't within earshot.

-0-

She'd wanted to stay. But he didn't want that added complication. He'd either be trying to impress her (because goodness knows there is nothing more impressive than being able to lift yourself from a wheelchair to a bed) or he'd be trying to hide the pain (because, oddly, the only thing his legs could feel, it seemed, was pain). So he talked her into leaving with Daniel and Teal'c.

He just didn't realize that he had to talk her out of coming back as well. He's pretty sure that visiting hours are over, at least if this place has anything remotely like visiting hours. She slips into a chair in the corner of the room, and obviously thinks that he's asleep.

"Don't you have a bed, Carter?" he asks.

"Why? Are you inviting me into yours?"

He laughs, "I've got a perfectly good one at my house if you need it. I'm pretty sure it would be better than what you've got there."

She smiles, "I've got a bed at my place and one at the base. They're just all missing one cranky Colonel."

"Dad leave?" he asks.

She nods.

"He's been gone a lot lately, hasn't he?" Jack asks.

Sam shifts in a way that lets Jack know that he's hit, quite by accident, onto something a lot larger than geography. "You know… the alliance…it's important," she defends.

He wonders how many other things Sam thought were more important than her. He wants to gather her up in his arms, and make everything ok. The only problem with that plan is his arms are currently so sore that he's not sure he'd be able to manage it. Oh, that's not the only problem with it, the nurses would probably get pretty angry about that as well.

So he'll just have to use his words, instead. "He loves you."

Tears well up in Sam's eyes, "You say that like it means something."

"It's the only thing that means something."

"No, because people can love you, and you're still all alone. I'm sick of just being loved! I want someone to actually be there for me!" Sam says, with the volume of a whisper and the fury of a shout.

"I'm here," he says giving her a faint smile.

"Only because you can't run away."

"No, Sammy. I am here, always," and he holds out his hand.

She crosses the room, and gives him a hug much longer than you'd expect with the side of the hospital bed poking into her side. He was going to try to make her leave. But he isn't going to do that anymore. He's figured out that she needs to be here as much as he needs her to be.

She pulls the chair over to his bed.

"Tell me something, tell me something good," he whispers.

"Once we went on to a…place," she says looking around in a way that clues him in she really means planet, "That had these lovely golden flowers, as far as the eye can see. They just went on forever."

He smiles, and closes his eyes.

"And the view from your deck? You remember it? It's right in town, but you've got some many trees you'd never know it…"

"Except when you hear the traffic at 5 when everyone's coming home from work," he says, remembering.

And she gives him the good memories, one by one, until they both fall asleep.

-0-

It's amazing, the amount of things you take for granted until you can't do them anymore. The first time he managed to actually have a bowel movement in the bathroom instead of a diaper was more amazing than he ever imagined possible. The first time that he lifted himself from his wheelchair to the bed gave him a sense of accomplishment he never thought he'd feel. The emotions that went through him when he put on his pants by himself for the first time were not something he was likely to forget. Neither were the emotions that came a few second later when he glanced over at the clock and realized that the task had taken him a better part of the hour.

People kept telling him that he was making progress. He knew that he hadn't even mastered what the average preschooler had, so he didn't consider that much progress. He'd only been at rehab for a week when they started planning for his "outpatient" services.

"Wait a second. I can't leave. I've only met half of my therapy goals, and most of those still take a ridiculous amount of time. I am not ready to throw in the towel and say that this is as good as it's going to get!" he protests.

"That's not at all what we're saying. You'll still continue to work with us three days a week for four hours," the therapist says calmly.

"How am I supposed to get here? We haven't even begun to talk about driving! How am I supposed to get ready for therapy? It would take me a whole day just to get dressed!" he rants.

"Sam is taking you home. We'll be talking to her about the things she should and should not help you with. There are a lot of things that we do want you to do by yourself. Even if it takes a lot more time. That will be part of you therapy homework. She can help you with the rest of it. She can certainly help you with the driving for now. Later, when you've got the rest of your daily living tasks figured out we can start working on that one. By then we'll know what kind of a vehicle you're going to require. There are a lot of different models we can get based on how far your therapy has advanced by then.

Jack takes a deep breath, and nods his head. He knows that the rest of his objections to being sent home so soon are things that he can better address when Sam comes for her evening visit. He has managed to talk her into sleeping at home most nights since he came to rehab. Nothing he could stay could stop her from spending most or all of the hours between work and sleep by his side however.

-0-

"Sam, they're talking about sending me home," Jack says as soon as she comes in for the day.

"I know, that's great news!" she exclaims.

"I am so not ready. If they let me stay longer I can get better. I promise. If I go home right now, I am going to be a huge burden to you. I can't do anything myself!"

"Jack," she scolds, "You are NEVER a burden. I want to do these things for you."

"Sam, even if that were true, and honestly, it would be pretty weird if it was true, you don't have the time to do all of this. What is your plan? You're going to get me all dressed, and cart me around to therapists, and then go off to work?"

"Jack, Hammond understands our circumstances. He's allowed my work schedule to be flexible right now."

"I know that, and maybe we've reached the point where that has to stop. I feel like we're just on hold. Like I am keeping you from something big."

She grabs his hand, and smiles. She wonders how much of that "big" thing he remembers. If he remembers that they used to save the world together. If he knows that she'll probably have to save the world again. If he understands that soon, she will have to go back to full time missions, and leave him alone for days at a time. She wonders if that fear of abandonment isn't what is really at work here.

"Jack, I don't have to take care of you. We could hire a full-time nurse if we wanted to. We might have to do something part time as it is, although Janet has volunteered to help out whenever my mission schedule won't allow me. I want to do this."

"You want to change an old man's diaper and lift him into bed?" Jack asks.

"I don't see an old man anywhere," she says, leaning in enough that he could kiss her if he wanted.

He doesn't want, at least not yet. "That doesn't change the facts, Sam."

"Jack, you hardly need a diaper anymore, and I'm supposed to make you lift yourself into the bed. I do actually talk to your therapist, you know."

"You're supposed to do that usually, yes, but what about when I can't, Sam? I don't want you to go into this thinking that I am a lot better off than I am. I'm in rough shape. If you actually choose to do this yourself you are going to end up changing a lot of diapers, and doing a lot of lifting, and pulling my damned pants up. Not to mention the fact that you're going to have to do all the cooking and cleaning for a while. We haven't even started working on those things yet."

She laughs.

"What is so funny about that?"

"Jack, if you were perfectly healthy, I would still have to do all of the cooking and cleaning."

He laughs too, "That's true."

"I want this. I want you," she says.

He sighs, and nods his head. She leans forward and kisses him on the cheek, since he wouldn't take the bait and give her the kiss that she really wanted.

He still felt guilty. An old man robbing a young women of her freedom. Tying her down to a person who couldn't do everything anymore. But he's not tying her down. She's choosing this. If it becomes too much, they can always back up a step, and choose something else.

-0-

They all come to take him home. This isn't even a little surprising, because most days he has a visit or phone call from some or most of them. It's just funny, because they don't all fit in the van. The General, Janet, and Cassie have to ride separately.

They all still come back to the house. The sight of it brings back wave after wave of memory. They aren't particularly earth shattering or even that interesting. They do, however, fill in huge swathes of his life that up until now had been out of reach. It's like the background, blue sky, and green grass, had been added on to his jigsaw puzzle. It has a frame now, and the only thing he can't make out is the picture in the center. The most important part.

There were three steps going up to his house. Such a small number that most people wouldn't even think about or remember they existed. Sam and her father had built a large and stable ramp over them. He'd been operating the arms of his wheelchair by himself. Not only did that make his arms stronger so he could do nifty things like get from his chair to the toilet by himself, but it also allowed him to feel more independent. Like he was in charge of his own life.

He tries to get up the ramp by himself, but he doesn't have enough inertia. He starts to slide down almost immediately. Teal'c catches him, and starts to push him up. Everything in Jack wants to object. He wants to tell the big man that he is perfectly capable of doing this himself.

Only, he knows that he is probably not. He doesn't want to accept help, but also really doesn't want to struggle and fail in front of his friends.

The furniture has been re-arranged. No-one mentions it, and that annoys Jack. For all they know he doesn't even remember that the furniture used to be different. They could be trying to deceive him, and convince him that this is the way that the furniture always was. He knows why they did it, though. He never would have been able to navigate the house with the furniture the way it was before.

His friends stay for hours; it's a Saturday morning. Sam orders pizza for lunch. They all go out, and sit on the porch, and Jack is struck by the sudden feeling that something is missing. That there is something he should be doing. He looks at Cassie. "Chess," he says.

She grins, "Every Saturday when you are on Earth."

He's not sure why they didn't bring this up before. Perhaps they think that his mind is just as broken as his body. They are wrong, though. They'd given him cognitive assessments at rehab, and he knows that his problem-solving, working memory, and processing speed were all above-average. It's just the long-term memories that are a little hard for him to reach.

They lay out the chess boards, and they play a good game. Cassie has good strategy for her age, although she is no match for his military skills.

He calls all the pieces by their correct names, and this makes everyone a little bit sad. Then he remembers to call the knights 'horses' and everyone perks up.

By the time everyone leaves, it's six at night. This is, of course, not a time he would ever consider going to bed before, but it's not before anymore. He has therapy tomorrow morning, which means he's going to have to be up at three in the morning to get dressed in time. Yep, he's going to get dressed in order to prepare to go somewhere to practice getting dressed; well, that and a lot of other things.

He still hopes that he will learn to walk, even though he can tell that Sam has begun to lose hope. Or, at least, to plan for the fact that he might never walk again.

"Sam, I think I'm going to go to bed," Jack says as he rolls into the house.

"Ok," she says, following him in case he needs any help or falls down.

He starts with brushing his teeth. He opens the drawer with the toothpaste. It is right where he expected it to be. He opens all the other draws, and finds in them exactly what he expected to find I them.

"What are you looking for?" Sam asks.

He gets the strange feeling that she wouldn't be able to help him find it.

"Where is all of your stuff?" he asks. Thinking back, he couldn't see a single thing in the whole house that looked feminine. Well, that didn't exactly present the strongest case, since Sam wasn't the most feminine person he'd ever met. But he hadn't seen a single thing in the whole house that looked like Sam.

"I couldn't keep much stuff here before; we were a secret," she says without so much as a guilty pause.

Right, the stupid frat rules. "We're not a secret anymore."

"I know. I've got a bag of things in the guest room. Before you know it, I'll have piles of physics magazines in your way all the time."

They both know that's a lie. First of all, Sam is a very neat person, unlike him. Second of all, if there were really magazines lying around, it would be a health hazard to him.

"Why the guest room?" he asks.

"I didn't know… I mean, you're recovering, and you don't remember me. I didn't know if you wanted to share a bed," she says, with awkward self-consciousness.

"I'm not ready to share… more than a bed, but if you want to, I promise to keep to my own side," he says, letting a little vulnerable sadness into his eyes.

When they actually go to bed, they don't keep strictly to their own sides. It starts with his hand being extended to her, and her taking it. It ends with them laying on their backs, side by side, shoulders and knees and hips all touching, and their hands clasped together tightly between them.

**Note: I use words like "crippled" in this because that's what how I believe Jack would see it. I cringe every time I use them. I tried taking them out, but it didn't read like Jack anymore.**


	5. Care Too Much

"_Some people care too much;_

_I think it's called love."_

-Winnie the Pooh

Jack and Sam are sitting on the porch, sharing lemonade, the closest his doctors will let him have to a beer, when a neighbor looks over the high fence and asks with concern, "Jack, what happened?"

Jack tries to remember his name. He fails at that, but he has enough pieces of his life that it doesn't bother him. He knows that he didn't often talk to neighbors, and there is a chance that even without the loss of memory, he would have no idea who this man was.

"Injured in the line of duty," Jack replies.

"Man, that sucks!"

"It does, but I probably won't need the chair much longer," Jack says. He's about to graduate to a walker. At least for part of the day. He's really not sure that's much of an improvement. A walker is actually going to make him feel a whole lot older.

"Well, I really appreciate you serving your country," the man says. Jack thinks the conversation is almost over, and goes back to enjoying his backyard. Then the man says, "Who's the pretty lady?"

"My girlfriend, Samantha Carter."

"Lucky," the man says as he returns to his house.

Sam is grinning from ear to ear when he turns back to her. "Is that not something we've said before?"

She shakes her head.

"I am an idiot," he says.

"Then or now?" she asks concerned.

"Oh, definitely then. If you can call Samantha Carter your girlfriend in anything but your fantasies, you do it," he says.

She laughs.

"It's not just in my fantasies, is it?" he asks.

She shakes her head, and then moves to rest her head on his shoulder. It brings back a memory of another time when he lost his memory. He'd told her that he had feelings, and then joked they were about Teal'c.

"You've said things," she assures him, "Just not that."

"What?" he asks. He is still hoping for some flashes of their time together. He's well enough now that he'd like to resume his relationship with Sam exactly where the left off before he got hurt. He just can't remember where that was.

"You told me that you cared about me way more than you were supposed to," she says. He remembers the za'tar'c testing.

"And?" he prompts.

"It was enough," she says with a contented sigh.

Sam is used to getting by on emotional rations. He wants to offer her a feast. Watch her eat affection until she becomes engorged on it.

He wraps an arm around her, "I love you, Sam."

She pulls back in shock, and looks at him.

"Too soon?" he asks nervously.

"I love you, Jonathan O'Neill," she says, kissing him.

He kisses her back, but when they separate he warns. "Don't full name me unless I'm in trouble."

"Oh, you are definitely in trouble," she teases, kissing him again.

-0-

When Sam comes home from work on Jack's third day back home, she isn't surprised to see him asleep on the bed. She is however, surprised to see him asleep on the bed in a suit.

She sits down next to him, and debates whether or not she should wake him up. She finally does, with a light kiss on the cheek.

"What time is it?" he asks, startled by the fact that his short rest after the exhausting process of getting dressed turned into a nap.

"At little after five," she says.

"Good, our reservation isn't until six. Hurry up and get ready."

"Get ready?" she asks.

"You like Italian, right? I couldn't remember anything about your tastes in food."

"We're going out?" she asks.

His stomach drops out from inside of him. He'd spent the whole day planning and preparing for this outing, and it never once occurred to him that she wouldn't exactly want to be seen in public with him. "We don't have to, Sam. I'd understand if you didn't want to go out in public with me until I'm out of the wheels. I'll just cancel."

"No, you don't, fly boy. That is so not what this is about. It's just with the frat rules, we could never go out before. You never really expressed any longing or made me feel like you really missed going out. So I just assumed that it didn't matter to you. Apparently, I was wrong."

Sometimes he worries that without his memory, he's a different person that he was with it. That the differences are so subtle that no-one can really prove they are even there. No-one can really be certain if he is the same Jack O'Neill that he was before.

"I think I like dating," he says.

"Good, because I love it. The dinners, and flowers, and long phone calls, and dancing…" she freezes, covering her mouth in horror at what she just said.

"It's ok," he tells her.

"No, it's not. I'm sorry," she says.

"You can mention things that I can't do, Sam."

"Let's try this whole conversation again. A surprise date? I love the idea. I'll go put on a dress," she says, kissing him as she walks out of the room.

Jack lays there for a second, trying to figure some way that he could give her the dancing that she wants, before he heaves himself up, and back into his chair.

-0-

Sam was a little nervous about the mechanics of going out to eat with someone in a wheelchair. She almost wished they could have done it for the first time on something that wasn't a date. A sort of dry run before the nerves of dating were added to the nerves of not making another snafu like mentioning dancing.

She finds, to her surprise, when they get to the restaurant that he obviously mentioned his condition when he made the reservation. They are led, straight away, to a table with one of the chairs missing. The table is about the right height for a wheelchair, unlike the one in Jack's house, and he slides under it with ease. The waiter hands them their menus, and Jack orders the wine before the waiter leaves. He's not supposed to be drinking, but Sam decides not to bring it up.

"You're good at this," she whispers.

"You're surprised by that?" he asks puzzled.

"It's just that I never really pictured you as a romantic sort of guy," she says.

"Haven't we…" he waves his hands around.

"Frat rules," she says.

"Right, but I would have thought that I came up with some sort of date that could be done in private."

"Of course, it's just different seeing you in a restaurant."

He stares at her, suspicious, but he has no idea what he is suspicious of. She opens the menu in front of her face, completely obscuring it from his view. He turns his attention to his own menu.

She wants to do something to distract him. To make is so he'll forget all about the conversation they just had. She reaches her foot over, and lightly touches his leg.

Then she draws it back. Footsie, just another thing they can never do. It's a small thing. A tiny thing, and she shouldn't care. Somehow, this loss hits her like all the others didn't. She couldn't react to any of the big things, because you're a pig if you're angry your boyfriend can't dance with you, and you have no idea what your sex lives will be like. Yet, from behind the safety of a menu she allows herself to grieve over the loss of footsie.

His hand reaches toward her, around the menu. "You ok?" he asks softly. The menu wasn't enough to hide her.

She puts the menu down. "It's stupid."

He shakes his head.

"I tried to play footsie," she says. "Jack it's not important. I shouldn't even notice. I should think, and not… I mean, you're dealing with all of this stuff, and I shouldn't…" she trails off, unable to put anything into words. She hasn't had much practice talking about her feelings. Not since her mom died, anyway. She's moved enough that she never got the chance to develop deep friendships. The kind of friendships where you stay up all night talking. Neither her father nor her brother are the sort of people to confide in. Being one of the rare girls in the military certainly didn't lend itself to the girlish task of talking about her feelings. She's rusty at it. Perhaps even rustier than he is; after all, he spent a big chunk of his adult life married.

"It's nice sometimes not to be the only one noticing those things, the tiny little holes in my life that are never going to be filled," he says.

She takes the hand that he offers. He runs his thumb across hers. It gives her the feeling of electricity that she'd been aiming for with her feet. It's not the same, but it will work.

"In every relationship, you know exactly what you want it to be like, but they all fall short. Maybe this is a good thing. Right from the beginning, we know that this is going to be different than what we wanted," he says.

"Jack, this is not a consolation prize. Having you, with your injury, is way better than not having you… publicly," the last word is added quickly, like a mistake or a lie, but Jack doesn't notice.

"If it gets too hard, Samantha, you'll tell me, right?" he asks nervously. Maybe the footsie was her way of saying she wanted out. Oh, it wouldn't be because of the stupid game, he knew that. There were more than enough reasons for her to want to leave him. Some of which didn't even have to do with his disability.

The waiter approaches their table, "Are you ready to order?"

"We're going to need a little more time," Jack says, hoping that interruption doesn't mean that his question is going to be left unanswered.

"We'll get it figured out in time," Sam agrees, bringing Jack's hand to her face and giving it a kiss before returning to hand-holding and menu-reading.

-0-

When the phone rings, he rushes to get it, but his rushing is so slow that he figures there is a good chance the answering machine is going to pick it up. That's fine, so long as it's not Sam. She panics if she can't get a hold of him in the middle of the day.

Of course, Sam is on a mission today, so he doesn't have to worry about that.

He picks up the phone the exact second that the answering machine picks up. "Hello?" he says uncertainly, unsure if the person on the other end has already hung up.

The voice on the other line seems to be surprised by the answering machine, "I'm sorry. I must have the wrong number. I thought my sister lived here."

"You're looking for Sam?" Jack offers, over the beep of the machine.

"Ah… yeah, Samantha Carter, is she there?" Mark says, sounding surprised.

"She's at work right now, but I'll be happy to take a message for you, Mark."

The man pauses at this stranger using his name, "I'm sorry, do I know you?"

"To be honest, I'm not quite sure. I have some gaps in my memory caused by a recent injury. I've certainly heard about you though. I'm Jack."

"I'm sorry, is that name supposed to mean something to me?" the man says, still sounding completely polite at the surface with an undertone which clearly implied that Jack should be getting to the point, and now.

"I'm her boyfriend," he says.

There is a long pause on the other end of the line, and then Jack hears the words, "No, her boyfriend is Pete."

The humming in the elevator. Her face when he was injured. Her leaving base on time wearing a skirt.

None of that had been caused by him. No, she was dating this Pete.

He and Sam were a secret. But they weren't so much a secret that her boyfriend wasn't even clued in on it, were they? Sam really didn't strike him as the kind of person who would cheat, but… he didn't really know that, did he? Without his memory, he was completely at her mercy. Forced to believe whatever she told him.

"I'm sorry… like I said, I have amnesia. I don't remember why she stopped dating Pete," he stammers.

"You're living with her, though? I mean, I know for sure she was with my buddy two weeks ago, and now you're living wither her. That seems pretty fast to me."

His stomach drops out from under him. Two weeks? He just came out of his coma nine days ago. If she was with Pete two weeks ago… "I'll tell her that you called," he says, and hastily hangs up the phone.

-0-

He tried to come up with option number three. He tried all morning, but still he couldn't. Either Sam was a cheater – either on him or on Pete, he found it didn't matter to him – or she had lied about their whole relationship.

He didn't have any cold hard proof that he'd been dating Sam. Nothing more than the memory in the gate room. The rest of the memories, when closely examined, said a great deal about their feelings, but nothing about a relationship.

The locker room scene was only because of an alien virus. Even without memories, on another planet, he had only said he had feelings, and she had only rested his head on her shoulder. Even when their lives were on the line with the zatarc, he had not said too much, and she had asked that they pretend it never happened. They were professional. They were colleagues. Then he'd gotten hurt, and she'd decided she had to take care of her wounded bird.

She had always liked to take care of men with something wrong with them, she'd admitted as much herself with the whole Jonas incident.

He didn't want to be a charity case. He remembered being alone. He remembered lots and lots of being alone. He had hated it. He knew that now, with his wheelchair, he was a lot more likely to be alone than he was before.

She didn't have to be alone though. There was Pete. Not only that, she didn't have to live this half-life. This partial life. The life where the uncertainly of how complete their sex lives would be still loomed before them. A life without dancing and footsie. A life where she had to drive him everywhere, and everything had to be carefully planned.

She could have spontaneity, and her boyfriend riding on the back of her bike, and a lot of other things he couldn't give her that he couldn't even think of.

So he goes around the house, picking up the pieces of her. They're in every room now. Her coffee cups in the kitchen, almost out of reach in the cupboard. Her clothes in his dresser and closet. He folds them carefully in the suitcase she keeps in the guest room. Then his bathroom, and he slowly divorces their toiletries. She has enough magazines and books that they don't fit in her suitcase, so he goes out to his shed to get a box.

It's a difficult job in the mud, and he thinks about ridiculous he would feel if she found him here, half a day later, stuck in the mud. "I tried to kick you out, but I couldn't," he could imagine himself saying. He doesn't get stuck though, and he does get the box; a few, for good measure, actually. That turns out to be a good thing, because it takes three of them to fit and the books and scientific journals that have infested every corner of his house.

He's exhausted by the time he has all of her belongings assembled at the door, and it's more than a physical exhaustion.

A part of him wants to pretend that none of this happened. That he never found out that she was lying to him. A part of him, a bigger part than he would like to admit, wants to go on living in this fantasy that she was kind enough to give him.

But he loves her too much for that. Even if she never loved him, he does love her.

He won't steal her life from her. He's not that greedy.

-0-

Sam's heart stops when she sees all of her things in the hallway. "Jack! Jack!" she shouts.

He rolls out of the bedroom calmly. She doesn't know why she expected him to be hurt when she saw the bags. Perhaps she was confusing physical and emotional trauma. "What is going on?" she asks softly, coming toward him.

"Mark called," Jack says.

"What the hell did he say?" she asks, more confused by every word he says.

"He asked about Pete," Jack says, spitting the name out with a lot more venom than he meant to.

"Oh Jack, Pete, and I are over," Sam says.

"When?" he asks.

"I swear I would never cheat on you," she says, thinking that is the reason for the question.

"Two weeks, right? You broke up with Pete _after_ the accident," Jack says.

Sam is silent.

"We were never together? You lied to me! You took advantage of the fact that I didn't have any memories to trick me into a relationship!" he shouts.

Her stomach feels like it is filled with a thousand stones. Trick him? Is that what it would take for him to be with her? A trick? "It wasn't like that," she begins. But how can she explain? How can she tell him that she has loved him for a very long time? How can she look him in the face and tell him that she never would have done it unless she had honestly believed that he loved her back? How can she make him understand that she had been waiting for a long time for a way for her to be with him, any way, really. When this accident came along, she thought it was the way.

"I don't need your pity," he says.

"I don't pity you," she says.

He looks down at his legs for a long moment, and they both know that he doesn't believe that. That there are no words she could say that would make him believe that.

"Please, Jack," she says.

"Leave." The world feels heavy in the air between them. Like the commands that he used to give when she served under him. It's nothing like all the speech that they have shared since the accident. After a long silence, she picks her things up, and make the way to the car. He balances a box on his lap, and wheels himself out to help her.

As she takes it from him she desperately wants to say something. Maybe "I love you", or "please let me stay", or "you're an idiot, shut up and I'll make you dinner". But instead, she settles for "goodbye".

Then she goes back to her empty house, full of the strange stillness that occupied houses always have after having been left alone for a while. She lies on her bed and sobs, because he doesn't love her.

He sits in his chair, because the transfer to the bed would be too much work, and sobs because he does love her.


	6. All on my own

"_This is my family. I found it, all on my own. _

_It's little, and broken, but still good. _

_Yeah, still good."_

-Lilo and Stitch

Jack was staring to think that he had all of his memories back. Then, last night, a few memories came back to him in a dream. Nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but it was disconcerting to find things that you hadn't realized you'd lost.

He wakes up to the sound of his name, but it's not spoken by Sam's voice. He's not used to anyone else waking him up. He realizes that really, until the accident he wasn't used to anyone waking him up.

"Daniel?" he says squinting at the man hovering over his bed.

"Finally, I was about to have to start shaking, and we all know that sometimes brings back a black ops move." Daniel freezes in horror as he realizes that Jack probably couldn't pull off many of his black ops moves anymore.

"What are you doing in my bedroom?" Jack asks.

"Sam told me about the fight."

Jack blinks. It had been a hell of a lot more than a fight, but that still didn't explain anything. "What are you doing in my bedroom?"

Daniel laughs. It's that comforting laugh that people do when he does something exactly like they would expect him too. Apparently he is playing the role of the angry Colonel very well right now. "Jack, she just wanted to make sure you could get ready for the day ok."

"I'm fine, Daniel, I don't need her," he says.

"Right well, that's not even close to true. I'm here more to deal with the physical needs than the emotional ones. Although, I'm a good listener," he says.

"If I remember right, you are much more of a talker," Jack says.

Daniel grins, "Well, that's true, so where do we begin with this whole business?" Daniel surveys his friends body with a bit of awkward practicality.

"I can take care of myself," Jack insists.

"I know, but Sam thought you'd sleep late after the fight, and she doesn't want you to be late for therapy. I want to help, Jack. I wanted to help from the very beginning." Daniel pulls of the pants, and after a glance at the clock, Jack doesn't object. He is going to be late for therapy if he doesn't let Daniel to the lion's share of getting him ready. "I was against her lying. I thought that she, T and I should have all taken shifts. Stayed here one day out of three."

"I never would have let you do that," Jack says, as he sits up and pulls of his own pajama shirt.

"That's exactly what she said you'd say about it. That's why she did what she did."

"So she weaseled her way into being my nurse by pretending she loved me?" Jack says.

Daniel's brow furrows looking at his friend, "She was never pretending that she loved you ,Jack. She was just pretending that you guys had acted on your mutual love." Daniel lifts his nearly-naked friend into the wheelchair. It strikes Jack that this should feel more awkward than it is. But when you really need something, and you have someone around who really doesn't mind giving it to you, it's never awkward. In fact, it's sort of beautiful, after its own fashion.

"Do you need a new one?" Daniel asks, gesturing toward the adult diaper. Even that isn't awkward.

"No, but I don't wear them during the day," Jack tells him, pointing to his underwear drawer.

It should be much stranger to have a friend dress him. But once you've been through war with someone, nothing is out of bounds. Not even awkward questions. "Daniel, I'm working with limited memory here, so you've got to be honest with me. Do you really think she loves me?"

Daniel stops pushing Jack into the bathroom to come around in front of the wheelchair and look his friend in the eye, "I know she loves you, Jack."

"Then what was with Pete?"

"Pete was a filler. She couldn't have you. Not until one of you was ready to give up their place on SG-1. She never really wanted Pete. When you got hurt… when it looked like it was permanent, I was crushed. I knew that you wouldn't like it. I mean, no-one would like it, but you would like it less than other people. But there was also a tiny part of me that was glad. This meant that the two of you could be together. That you had a chance, possibly your only chance, of being really happy. Now, if you're going to be injured _and _miserable, well, that really bites."

Jack is quiet, and Daniel resumes getting his friend ready for therapy. After a few seconds, he stops, "Don't you love her, Jack? I only ask because my job relies on me being good at reading things, and if you're not in love with Samantha Carter, I am really bad at it. Bad enough to be putting the whole world at risk."

Jack smiles, "I love her."

"Ok, good; then you'll call her up, and all this silliness will end."

"She deserves better than me, Daniel."

"Why, because of the chair?" Daniel asks, annoyed. When Jack nods, Daniel shuts the bathroom door with a lot more force than necessary, "How would you feel if she pulled that crap on you? How would you feel if she was hurt, and alone, and she pushed you away, because she thought you'd be happier without her?"

Jack knows that his heart would break. Still, she could do better than him, even if she doesn't realize it.

"Just make sure that you and T watch over her, too. She might not physically need the help, but…" Jack says.

Daniel's face falls in a way that lets Jack know he was more right than he'd like to be. "Teal'c is over there right now."

For the first time since Mark's phone call, Jack has no idea what the right thing to do would be.

-0-

"If you need a break, feel free to sit down," the therapist urges.

Jack would tell the women that he was fine, but not only would that be a waste of breath he can't spare right now, but his panting would prove it untrue.

He's walking. Yes, it's with a walker, and only across the room at this point, but it's walking all the same.

He smiles as he reaches out and touches the wall.

Three times across the room in an hour, not bad at all. As he catches himself thinking this thought, he can't help but laugh.

-0-

He has been sitting here with the phone on his lap for almost half an hour. Every time he brings it up to his ear he thinks of some excuse – perhaps she's still at work, or in the gym, or he just needs a few more minutes to form an apology. The worst of all was the deadly fear that she was already with Pete. He would have no-one but himself to blame if she ended up with the consolation prize.

He finally sucks it up, and makes the call.

"Sam?" he asks, his voice sounding all strange.

"Are you ok? Did you fall? Do you need me to come over? Do you need an ambulance?"

"Wow, calm down, I'm fine," he says. There is silence on the line, and he can tell that she doesn't quite believe him, "I'd like you to come over, though."

Warmth bubbles up in her chest. "Ok."

There was more he needed to say, but the finds it harder than he thought. It is much harder than it was when he practiced. "I'm sorry, Sam."

"I never should have lied to you," she says. She still isn't sure what this is. If he wants her to return as a friend, or a nurse, or a girlfriend. If he wants a movie night, or to reach something on a high shelf, or to continue their relationship.

"I didn't know that…" he pauses, trying to find the words he wants to say. The words that he hopes are true, even though he doesn't know, "I didn't know that you'd choose me. I thought this accident, and everything… made you leave him, and end up with me. I didn't want you like that."

"I chose you," she assures him, sensing the uncertainty in his voice. "I would have chosen you a long time ago, if it weren't for the rules."

"Good," he says, his confidence restored.

"Should I pack before I come?" she asks uncertainly.

"Yes. Come home, Carter."

-0-

He's sitting on his front porch when she pulls up. He's literally on the porch. No chair in sight, just his walker out in front of him.

"Jack?" she says with a great deal of surprise, and no small amount of worry.

He stands up, and the process seems so long and painful that Sam tries to run over to help him. He waves her away, and does it by himself, even if it takes a while. Then he goes over to her step by step. She waits for him, knowing that even one step in his direction would be offensive to him right now. When he reaches her, she starts hugging and kissing him.

"Too much," he says, out of breath.

"Jack, I'm so sorry! Let's get you in the house."

"Yeah, on the couch, and we can do more of that," he jokes, though the words come out in pants because of the physical exertion.

By the time they make it up the steps, Sam is wishing that Jack never showed of his new skill. Jack is, too, but he's not about to admit it. He's eaten enough crow for the day, thank you very much.

Sam helps him into the couch. She waits patiently for him to catch his breath. He reaches a hand up to her face. "Why did you choose me?"

Her eyes sparkle, but an answer doesn't come for a long time. Finally her shoulders shrug. "I don't know? Why do I want to go into space? Maybe it's biology or maybe it's psychology, or maybe it's just who I am."

He kisses her, long and hard, and before long that isn't the only thing that's long and hard.

She doesn't notice.

He think it would be rude to bring it up. On the other hand, he figures that she probably worried about it as much as he did.

"Fully functional," he whispers.

She looks down, and smirks as she pulls him into another kiss.

-Epilogue-

She's stuck at work again. Its days like this that he wishes he hadn't quite retired. Oh, the Air Force was out, even with his increased mobility. There were plenty of things that he could have done, though.

He's glad that he didn't when she's at home. He wouldn't want to miss a second with her. Even when she's on regular work hours, he doesn't mind it. He gets to be lazy, and have a bit of a bachelor life. Then his wife comes home, and he still gets to have her.

It's these extended absences that make him feel like maybe, maybe there should be just a little bit more in his life.

The door pops open, and he turns to her, surprised. He figured she'd call when the quarantine was lifted.

He doesn't use words to ask his question. They rarely have to use words anymore.

"Turns out we didn't bring some rare infectious disease through the gate," she says with a shrug of her shoulders.

"You were all throwing up," he protests, coming over to feel her forehead with worry.

"Well, actually just Daniel and I threw up."

"Right, but Teal'c? It takes an awful lot to make a stomach like that queasy," Jack protests.

"I'm pretty sure Daniel's problem was a reaction to mine."

"That still doesn't solve the problem of why you got sick, Sam," he says.

She smiles at him.

He raises his eyebrows.

She nods.

He hugs her until he lifts her off the ground, and she squeals.

They'd never really tried to get pregnant, not seriously. She was thirty eight by the time they'd gotten married, and he was fifty-two. They'd had a long talk about Charlie, and the reproductive limits of the human species, and Sam's job, and the fact that even though Jack could walk pretty good with a cane he'd never be able to catch a running toddler. Most of all they'd talked about how much it would hurt if it never happened.

Then Sam had gone off her birth control, and they'd gotten a dog, and they'd never mentioned it again. That was over a year ago now.

"So… what's the plan?" he asks, ushering her over to the couch. To an untrained observer, it might look like he's babying her, but that's not what's happening. His legs can still only support his weight for so long, and they were just supporting hers as well.

Pressing her so quickly after she found out might annoy some women. But he knows that she has a plan, and a few more in her pocket if the first one doesn't work. His Samantha always has a whole alphabet of plans.

"I'm going to work in the science division until the baby comes. They offered me area 51, but I didn't want to move away from our family."

He knows that she doesn't mean people that are related to them by blood. He means the people who used to come on Thursday nights when Sam didn't feel comfortable leaving him alone with his walker when she went shopping with Cassie. The same people that still come around on Thursday nights, even though there is no pretense of him needing help taking care of himself now. Daniel and Teal'c might make a strange extended family, but they also make a strong one.

He nods his head, agreeing to her plan.

"After the baby comes… I don't know," she hedges, looking at him.

He blinks, having no idea what she is asking.

"You're fine with staying with it, right?" she asks.

It takes him a minute to process the words. The answer seems so obvious that he doesn't even bother to answer it, even after he understands.

"Are you going to be fine being a stay-at-home dad? I mean, if you're not, we can put the kid in daycare or something. I just don't like the idea of dropping the kid off at daycare, and then going to do something dangerous."

"Sam, I stay home all day anyway," he says.

"I know," she says looking in his face.

"Why wouldn't I take care of our kid?" Then a sad idea occurs to him, "Unless you don't trust your old crippled husband with a baby."

She snuggles against him, not bothering to correct his self insults. She's done it so many times, and she knows that he doesn't really believe them. "I want you to take care of it. I just didn't want to force you."

His listlessness is gone. He has something important to do for the first time since his injury. Something more important perhaps than when he was back on SG-1. He places a hand on her belly, and the family sits still together.

Consciousness slips.


End file.
